Re-reading Flora Nwapa’s Efuru and Idu: Myth as a Vehicle for Cultural Transmission and Awareness

Abstract

Folklore is the traditional art, literature, knowledge and practice that are disseminated largely through oral communication. It consists of the things that a given set of people traditionally believe, do, know and say; their worldview and outlook to life, handed over to them from generation to generation orally. Myth is an important element of folklore that accounts for the origin of things, and events and try to answer the very important why questions on how several events and phenomenon came into being. This is important in helping a homogeneous set of people accept the realities of their lives; condition and express their perception and outlook to life as well as project those intricate elements that mark and distinguish them from other group of communities. Just like earlier stated in a previous study, Flora Nwapa is one of the pioneering and leading voices in Nigerian and African literature. She, alongside Achebe through their writings was able to showcase a very important fact that Africans did not hear of culture for the first time from Europeans. This was made possible by the incorporation of folklore materials along all other cultural artifacts in her novel. In our previous studies carried out on the two novels, we looked at myth as a Plot Generator, Conflict Generator and Resolver. On a re-reading one realizes that myth in the novels performs some other significant functions as a vehicle for cultural transmission worthy of critical discourse. This study highlights on how the myth of uhamiri in the works of Nwapa functioned significantly as a vehicle to transmit the culture and create a deeper awareness on the rich cultural heritage of the African people against the distorted and disconcerted image created by the Europeans during their earliest contact with Africa.